Our final week was a busy one. Despite the rush to finish up our experiments, complete our posters and get them printed, we still found time for one last activity. Ms. Tanya Whitehouse at The Food Connection showed us how to make sauces from the herbs that we had grown in our global gardens and how to incorporate those into nutritious food bowls.
Summer Undergraduate Research in Environmental Health Sciences
This blog describes the events and activities associated with SURES, our ten week summer undergraduate research environmental health sciences program.
Friday, August 4, 2023
Our Final Week
Our final week was a busy one. Despite the rush to finish up our experiments, complete our posters and get them printed, we still found time for one last activity. Ms. Tanya Whitehouse at The Food Connection showed us how to make sauces from the herbs that we had grown in our global gardens and how to incorporate those into nutritious food bowls.
Thursday, July 20, 2023
SURES Week of July 17
Map of the University of Kentucky campus. The soil sampling sites by the SURES students are indicated by the red stars. |
On Tuesday, discussed how to create professional CVs and resumes.
Friday, July 14, 2023
SURES Week of July 10
On Tuesday, we
met with our Co-Director, Dr.
Kevin Pearson who discussed his career journey and his
research on maternal exposure to environmental contaminants such as PCBs and
the impact of exercise in modulating the effects of these exposures.
On Wednesday, some of us attended the ice cream social hosted by UK’s
Office of Undergraduate Research and got to meet students participating on
other summer research programs.
On Thursday, we met On Thursday, we met with Associate Dean Wendy
Jackson who described the processes involved in admissions to UK Medical School
and gave us great advice on how to improve our applications. Afterwards,
we painted depictions of our summer research projects which helped us
visualize the science behind our work.
Friday, June 30, 2023
SURES Week of June 26
Coffee chat with the Near Peer Mentors On Monday, some of us met at the lab in the TH Morgan Biology Building to finish processing and weighing our soil samples to prepare them for analyses. On Tuesday, we met with Dr. Ketrell McWhorter who told us about her fascinating career journey that started with an MBA and a role in executive banking with a "side gig" as a personal trainer and fitness instructor, then a PhD in Molecular Epidemiology and a fellowship at the NIEHS and finally, her current position as a professor where she leads a global health program. On Thursday morning, Co-Director of the SURES program Dr. Kevin Pearson and I met with the near peer mentors to chat about their experiences with their mentees and the program. On Thursday afternoon, we learned about using a Restorative Justice Community Building Approach to address mental health. |
SURES Week of June 19
On Tuesday, we met with Dr. Zach DeVries to hear about his career journey and research on the health impact of household pests and work in developing better methods of pest control.
Friday, June 16, 2023
Week of June 12
This week, we met with Dr. Olga Tsyusko-Unrine
who discussed her career journey and her work using c.elegans to identify
mechanisms by which environmental contaminants exert their adverse
effects.
Friday, June 9, 2023
SURES Week of June 5
This week, the SURES participants met with Dr. Ellen Hahn who talked to us about her career journey, her activities in health policy, especially her work in advocating for smoke-free environments, as well as her research on radon exposure.
On Thursday, Dr. Sara Police joined us and talked to us about her work on developing a global gardens at the University of Kentucky campus. We were then assigned a global region and started to prepare planters that would represent each global region.